(Don’t forget to check out our giveaway at the bottom of our Christmas Dinner post!)

Sauces are my favorite part of cooking, from ketchup to béarnaise. Since I love (and aspire to) French techniques, a good chunk of the sauces out there are based on some form of stock — vegetable stock, chicken, fish, beef, veal, lobster, lamb, duck, and so forth.

Making stock is usually a pretty simple thing to do, but there’s a technique used to take a certain type of stock to the next level of culinary refinement — demi glace.
The journey begins…

This month’s POM recipe had an interesting twist from the start. Our local Space Coast newspaper, Florida Today is doing a feature on food blogging and had contacted Christey and me, asking if they could “ride along” on one of our blog posts. The day they called, I had just figured out what I was going to do for my POM post for September, so we arranged a get-together and I cooked up some lamb.

Lamb and pomegranate have a pretty close history in the middle east, where pomegranates are common. On the French side, a bordelaise is a refined red wine sauce that pairs well with hearty meats like lamb. Personally, I think the traditional mint and lamb combination is far too overpowering for a tasty cut of lamb, and I also have an irrational dislike of rosemary. But, fresh thyme is also a common lamb herb (and is one of my favorite herbs in general), and substituting pomegranate juice for red wine in a serious reduction creates a sweet, fruity taste that (I think) makes an interesting contrast to the mint jelly so common in UK or stuffy New York City preparations of lamb. So, I took the concept of a reduced red wine bordelaise and substituted POM 100% pomegranate juice, used fresh thyme and some chives for the herbs, and took a lot of liberty with some traditional lamb concepts.

And, we did all this while Christey and I were being interviewed on camera and video. We’ll link to the final articles when they become available.

We made a pomegranate bordelaise over grilled lamb chops, with a spinach greek salad and pomegranate vinaigrette.

Recipe and step by step inside…

I got my December Saveur magazine in the mail the other day, and the cover trumpeted both filet mignon, and “The Secrets of French Sauces”. Sauces are my favorite culinary field. I thought to myself: “Self: check out the sauces article. Maybe it’ll add some info to that book by Peterson you keep reading.” Lo and behold, the article was written by James Peterson himself.

I urge everyone interested in sauces to check out this issue. He’s a modest fellow — he refers to his highly acclaimed book (and one of my top-3 cooking must-have books) Sauces as “A book I wrote in 1991″. That “book” is an amazing history, from the salty/fish garum sauces of Rome, to the basic mother sauces of French cuisine, to instructions to develop an almost infinite variety of flavor based on those mother sauces, and beyond. In short, Peterson is one of my culinary idols, and I was pleased to see Saveur conned him into writing the centerpiece of the December issue, without once referring to the holiday season.

The thick, rich, very red sauce on the cover is a bordelaise, so named for the Bordeaux region of France, which is probably the most well known red wine producing region in the world. Peterson provides a classic recipe for bordelaise, over filet mignon. I had to make it, of course. Peterson has always been a tinkerer, however, and I’ve jazzed up his recipe by using flat iron instead of fillet, for some extra beefy flavor, with a few bordelaise substitutions as well. I served the steak and sauce over a braised root vegetable foundation, as a nod to the season.

Winter sizzle